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Google really needs to decouple the hardware from the OS. There's no good reason newer Android couldn't be installed on older phones.
Google doesnt do anything here. The OEMs need to port the Android kernel to older hardware.
They often just support one LTS kernel.
But Android even supports the LTS kernel for 6 years now.
Wrong. Google had multiple projects like Treble to decouple the software from the hardware. What happened with it?
Google develops Android and thus is responsible for it's update scheme. They already changed it quite a bit in the last years with GSIs and Project Treble but there's still no real seperation that would allow the same drivers and hardware blobs to be used independent of the Android Version or updating the Android version without these needing to be included every time.
That's what needs to change.
Their own phones have support for the mainline kernel. It is the vendors that dont want to upstream their drivers and produce half-proprietary garbage they dont publish, so nobody can update these devices.
But Googles decides, that that is possible. I fthey changed the structure to enforce a seperation there's nothing that would keep Android updates from those devices. Put all hardware and device specific stuf in a seperate layer and have it accessible to the updatable system. And it's not like these vendors have an alternative to go to
Could you elaborate?
Android uses Linux, a monolithic kernel. You cant just separate drivers.
I also heard that OEMs write horrible drivers, which wouldnt work on a microkernel without maaajor porting issues.
And there are Linux distros with rolling releases, where the drivers stay where they are and the OS around them gets updated without issue. I'm sure the smart people at the Android team could do something similar
The drivers are in the kernel, kept updated with every release. As I said, pixels at least boot with mainline kernel support, but the Android kernel is modded.
And then manifacturer use out of tree drivers as core part of their kernel.
Yes I know the manufacturers do, but there's no reason for the drivers to be replaced when the kernel is updated, you could hold them separately or reapply them after an update
This doesnt always work as nonstable kernels (or even porting to a newer kernel) changes in their interface.
Like, backportig patches to a 6 year or more old kernel is crazy! My 6a runs on 5.14 and that is a currently supported phone.
You can run new android on an old kernel, see lineageos
Yes and this is not secure. The kernel runs as root.
The kernel is the problem